Avner Offer

Our confidence in markets comes from economics, and our confidence in economics is underpinned by the Nobel Prize in Economics, first awarded in 1969. Avner Offer’s The Nobel Factor offers an unprecedented account of the impact of economics in the actual world: economic theory may be speculative, but its effects are tangible and powerful and the halo of the Nobel brand has sometimes led to disastrous consequences for societies striving to cope with the requirements of economic theory and de...

This extraordinary work, assembled in 1968 by Avner Offer – Oxford Professor of Economic History and a former soldier in the Six-Day War – is now published for the first time. Evoking the intimacy of a small unit in wartime, with its moral dilemmas and life and death experiences, the photographs bear witness to some of the most highly charged moments of the war. A selection of his pictures won the first prize in an exhibition at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art in 1968.